News Roundup: August 5 - September 9

We're leading the news roundup with something a little different this month. Following a suggestion from seanstar to plug little-known audio player Cog, I thought it'd be a good idea to (briefly) highlight a few audio apps for those of you with collections of game rip audio and other video-game sound formats. Please let us know in the comments if there are any others you recommend.

So first up there's Cog, a free open-source audio player that supports tracker formats (it, s3m, xm, mod), several video game formats, and a host of other common audio formats. With playlists, Growl support, and a small memory footprint, it's a great choice. But development has fallen away over the past few years. Use the latest nightly build rather than the 0.07 release, unless you run into stability issues.

The lightweight Vox music player is in rather more active (albeit slow) development, and comes close to matching Cog feature-for-feature -- with the bonus of a slick interface and some cool effects plugins.

Old school Mac fans will be pleased to note that SoundJam MP is available for OS X, although it doesn't work in Lion (nor does it support any video-game music formats).

Getting a little more focused, the Commodore 64 music player SIDPLAY was recently updated to work in Lion. It mimics the look and feel of iTunes, and was designed with the huge High Voltage SID Collection in mind.

Richard Bannister's M1 and Audio Overload lack the bells and whistles of the other players mentioned, but between the two of them they cover 34 different video-game music formats (M1 is for arcade music only; Audio Overload is for everything else).

If you're looking towards Apple's iDevices, try Modizer for multi-format playback. Sid Player and Module Player offer music in the Commodore 64 and Amiga sound formats, respectively.

Keep reading for the emulator updates, including new versions of Parallels Desktop, Pom1, Atari800MacX, and more.

Richard Bannister stated on his website that there will be no further BSNES updates until a C++0x compiler becomes available for Mac OS X Lion.

Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac is now available. New features include Lion integration, a more Mac-like appearance, support for running an additional Lion installation inside a virtual machine, support for up to 1GB of video memory in virtual machines, an improved iOS app for mobile/remote management, and the usual host of other incremental improvements. You'll need to have Lion installed to enjoy all the new features, though. Check out the Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac website for more information.

The latest development builds of Java-based PSP emulator JPCSP provide fixes to IO, MPEG, and more. Users of Mac OS X Lion should take note that Java is no longer bundled with the operating system -- you'll need to download and install it manually before running this emulator or other Java software. See the JPCSP website for more information about the emulator, download links, and a handy compatibility list.

The first stable build of Apple I emulator Pom1 has been released. No changes are listed for version 1.0.0, so it's not clear what, precisely, is different between this update and the previous 0.0.5 release. Check out the emulator's official website, or its SourceForge page, for more information.

Atari 800 emulator Atari800MacX has been updated to version 4.5.0. This update fixes an issue with the tab and escape keys not working in some instances. It also adds the option to change the application's sound level through the sound menu or key combos. See here for more information about the emulator, and for a download link.

Dolphin, a Nintendo Wii and Gamecube emulator, has been getting regular minor updates, with each change to the source leading to a new build for Windows and Mac OS X. Keep tabs on the Dolphin download page for the latest version.

Arcade emulator MAME, along with its Mac-specific port SDLMAME, picked up a few minor updates over the past month. The latest version, 0.143u5, sports the usual long and difficult to parse changelog. Head to the official MAME website for more information about the emulator, or grab a binary from the SDLMAME website.

Mac-only Commodore 64 emulator VirtualC64 has been updated to version 0.9.5.2. The sole change is a fix to a bug that caused crashes on some Lion installations. Check out the emulator's official website for more information and a download link.

SpeedofMac has also updated wxMupen64Plus, a front-end for Nintendo 64 emulator Mupen64Plus. Updates since the last news roundup fix a crash bug on changing video plugin and improve the input configuration and user interface. Get it from SpeedofMac's website.

DOSBox front-end Dapplegrey has been updated to version 2.29.3. This update fixes a couple of issues with setup executables. You can now also update via the Dapplegrey Updater application, which is available for download at the Classics For X Dapplegrey page.

Development continues -- albeit slowly -- on Amiga emulator PUAE, which is currently at version 2.3.3 and is still very much in beta. If you're feeling adventurous, head over to the emulator's github repository and give it a try; otherwise just use WinUAE through Wine, Crossover, Boot Camp, or your virtualisation app of choice.

Open-source machine emulator and virtualisation tool QEMU has been updated to version 0.15.0. See here for a lengthy (but well-organised) list of changes. You can learn more about QEMU at its official website.

Open-source x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualisation tool VirtualBox has been updated to version 4.1.2. Another maintenance release, this update fixes a number of issues with the GUI, guest systems, and several other aspects of the program. See the changelog here.